Field of the Invention
This disclosure provides techniques for rendering image frames. More specifically, this disclosure presents techniques for generating rendered content based on shot aggregation.
Description of the Related Art
Computer animation film studios have sometimes relied on a shot-based production pipeline in which the unit of work that travels down the pipeline is a shot. A shot is a continuous run of a virtual camera that typically includes a number of image frames. One department in the film studio may define the blocking and cinematography in a shot from storyboard images, after which the shot travels down the production pipeline to other departments that are responsible for detailed animation, lighting, and effects, among other things.
The shot is a particularly useful unit of work for animators and effects artists, who can add detailed animations and effects one shot at a time. However, shots are traditionally uncoordinated and distinct from each other. As such, attributes of one shot cannot easily be propagated to another shot. Instead, each shot is typically created from scratch or by manually copying elements from one shot in an existing file to another shot in a new file, which tends to be tedious and inefficient.